Reviews by MathBrush

This is a visual novel with no choices that deals with a race of beings called Harvesters that take away people's memories.

You play as one such harvester, and you meet a young redheaded single mother who has given up her child for adoption and wants you to wipe her memories.

You end up meeting another person who is entangled in her story, and you learn his past.

That art and music worked well. The writing was interesting, but seemed off, not following the conventions of plot and morality that I'm used to. I think I started thinking how very odd it was when someone said "You didn't just banish me to the friend zone or I wouldn't have sued you". There isn't any suing in the game; it might be a translation issue but I'm not sure it makes sense in any language.

Similarly, the endgame is that (Spoiler - click to show)You wipe the memories of her and her lover and then tell her you'll become her lover, which is kind of weird ethically.

I don't think this particular game is AI generated but these issues are similar to ones I've had with AI stories like Character AI (which my son plays), where the overall thing looks good but if you poke at it a lot of stuff just doesn't make sense. My guess is that it just needs some more time and attention, as it was written for Ludum Dare which doesn't give the author much time, I think.

I played this as part of the short games showcase.

This is a fun little game, reminding me of the Northnorth Passage or Out or Ad Verbum, all in good ways, but it is it's own thing and not a copy of anything else. It's a direction-based puzzler where each stride can take you to different kingdoms or even different corners of the earth.

I enjoyed the puzzle, although I kept thinking the solution would be (Spoiler - click to show)tang even though it didn't work and it didn't fit any of the clues. So I don't know what was going on in my brain. At one point I also thought the solution would be (Spoiler - click to show)literally typing out 'the opposite of east' since it starts with a T. Pretty fun!

This is a pretty straightforward interpretation of 'a game simulating a bill getting passed'. There's not a lot of characterization or strategy. It was useful to see exactly what all goes into it.

The US House Representative for my district visited my school I teach at recently and mentioned that around 10,000 bills were proposed last year of which some small number (like 27, googling says) actually got passed.

This game simulates that; I failed the house vote, got amendments, passed, passed senate, had president support, but got vetoed and lacked a supermajority.

Oh well. Lol

The game seems like it was made for a government event and it seems well suited for an educational venue.

This game has a bit of a different setup between the reader and the protagonist.

The narrative voice of the game is a sentient word. It addresses 'you', but 'you' doesn't mean the reader, it means a person in college that the word traded bodies with for a month.

The word is intrigued and obsessed with the human world, especially with things like color and visual stimuli.

The concept is clever, and there is a lot of enthusiasm that comes across as appropriate for a visitor from another world.

The longer it went on, the more I saw it as the story of someone who truly despises what they are; someone who does not like themself whatsoever. Because the word likes text least of all; it doesn't enjoy visual things more, it actively despises text.

There were two things that were a little weird about my interaction with the game. The first is that I felt like it was apologizing for itself a lot, which is weird because do you as a reader agree with it that it's non-ideal or feel sympathy for it? The second is that there was a wide range of interactivity which never fell into a rhythm for me; it went from wild combinatorial explosion to mostly linear.

Overall, I think it's a solid concept and that the game is just the right length for what it's exploring. I didn't click with all of it, but I did like parts and others might like all.

This game is framed as homework for translation in a Russian lit class (or similar).

You are given the poem ( a famous one: Он любил три вещи на свете by Анна Ахматова unless I copied it down wrong), and asked to translate it.

The issue is that, like most poems and most translation, it makes use of idioms that don't naturally have a unique counterpart in the other language (in this case, English).

Choosing the meaning to stick with can drastically change the meaning of the poem.

I though this was well made, and powerful.

In this Shufflecomp game, you play in an alternate reality where the Catholic church has eliminated both priests and Pope and has gone to use coin operated confessional booths that are resolved by computer.

Except you are 'computer' in this case. It is your job to absolve others.

The aesthetics of the game, both video and audio, are very well done, restrained but effective.

The writing is evocative and clear.

I only wish the scenarios had been a bit more daring. Few if any of the characters had done truly wrong, almost as if the game is about moral greyness, the lack of a need for confession.

But everyone knows someone who has done another wrong. Truly wrong. What about confession and absolution in those cases? There can be no forgiveness if there was no wrong. No reconciliation if there was no separation. The elimination of true regret and punishment is also an elimination of true happiness and redemption. So to see such a case would have been interesting...

This game was made for Shufflecomp.

In it, you play as someone on a train who is approached by another passenger. He wants to tell you stories of the six other travellers who had spent time on the train before getting off.

The game uses Decker, and has a fixed width retro font.

The stories are very diverse, and build towards the ending stories, those of you and the storyteller. Each story seems to focus on personal relationships, either in pairs or threes.

The writing was solid, and the stories made sense, but something felt missing for me that I can't put my finger on. Almost like buying a box of legos and finding that most of them are already one big molded piece, like bionicles or something. After reading each story, it was hard to say what each one was about. Maybe it was because people were acting in them not as real, flesh and blood people, but as archetypes, like reading a story about tarot cards or astrological signs.

I liked this game. The presentation was neat, with real-time smoke in the background over at-your-own-pace text (I'd love to see more of this in games that use real time elements, letting me read as fast or slow as I like while other live stuff happens in the background).

You play as...well, you don't really know. It seems you're in a kind of group, at first, with text represented in different colors and alignments.

You have to escape a burning room in a temple. Everything is chaos.

You can play multiple times, and it can take quite a while to figure out what's going on. But everything built on each other, and I found it quite clever.

I was debating between 4 and 5 stars, as I usually use the 5th star for 'would I play again?' but technically I already played twice, so I'll give it 5 stars.

This game was entered in Shufflecomp, and I played the French version.

In it, you play as a young adult/teen living in your parents house. This is primarily a graphical game, like Myst, with some interactive audio and visual elements and with your thoughts and feelings expressed through text.

It's a kind of opaque game, with two segments. In the first, I felt like it was a psychological exploration of the young, unsatisfied mind. Roaming the house, trying to find snacks, avoiding your parents' friends, doing chores, reminiscing about the girlfriend you broke up with.

The second half is more disturbing, as you (Spoiler - click to show)encounter a stone that lets you see a different side to this world, or perhaps another world altogether. You see different messages, and in the end...

Overall, this game has many exceptional elements; however, many of the best parts of the game are things that I personally am not very interested in (the graphics, some text on a timer, videos and music, etc.), as I am mostly drawn to text games due to their inconspicuousness, the ability to play them quietly and at your own speed without drawing a lot of attention.

I do love the two worlds vibe, and will try to remember this game when the next XYZZY awards for multimedia come out.

This game was entered in the Single Choice jam, but it has some surprising depth.

Visually, it's a stack of cards representing floors of a tower. Every time you go up a floor, a card gets added to the pile. You can hover over older cards to see where you came from, and there's an inventory you can hover over.

There are no actions you can pick except to, whenever you want, fall, an option listed at the top. At one point, you're explicitly forced to choose to fall or not.

You can turn on game hints for the game, which I did out of idle curiosity at one point, but I'm glad I did; the ending was fun, once I realized what had truly happened.

I wavered between 3 stars and 4 and even 5, and settled on the latter, as I liked the originality and the implementation.